Real-time video streaming over vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) has been considered as a critical challenge for road safety applications. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the computation complexity of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) encoder for VANETs. Based on a novel spatiotemporal neighborhood set, firstly the coding tree unit depth decision algorithm is presented by controlling the depth search range. Secondly, a Bayesian classifier is used for the prediction unit decision for inter-prediction, and prior probability value is calculated by Gibbs Random Field model. Simulation results show that the overall algorithm can significantly reduce encoding time with a reasonably low loss in encoding efficiency. Compared to HEVC reference software HM16.0, the encoding time is reduced by up to 63.96%, while the Bjontegaard delta bit-rate is increased by only 0.76–0.80% on average. Moreover, the proposed HEVC encoder is low-complexity and hardware-friendly for video codecs that reside on mobile vehicles for VANETs
